So, we’re coming up to the end of summer! Let’s talk about summer reading as we move toward Labor Day. What are you reading these days? Here’s what I’m reading.
In a recent issue focused on the U.S. constitution – not the best issue topic, but I digress – Jacobin published an interesting discussion between Anand Gopal and Ben Burgis on sortition.
For those not hip to fancy terms, ‘sortition’ refers to government by lot. It’s the random selection of public officials among regular citizens. It’s associated mainly with ancient Athens, notably the period around the time of the trial and execution of Socrates.
As a college student over 20 years ago, it was fashionable to identify as a person who voted ‘based on issues’ rather than based on party.
You probably know the idea. You didn’t just vote for a candidate because they ran as a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or Green. Rather, you looked carefully at their platform and voted for the person who ticked the right boxes.
Admittedly, we weren’t as clever as we thought. For leftists, the idea was to talk tough to Democrats. We said to them that we had certain issues we prioritized – health care, and so on – and we’d abandon the Democrats if they weren’t willing to fight for those issues. We announced our intention to vote for Ralph Nader – or an appropriate Nader equivalent – if Democrats failed to get with the program.
In practice, though, leftists rarely carried out the threat. Democrats repeatedly shunned universal health care. Most leftists continued voting for them anyway.
No doubt people at other points on the political map ran their own version of this. Centrists looked to candidate platforms to ward off ‘extremists.’ And right-wingers wanted to see the greatest hits of their own policy goals, lest they vote for some obscure right-wing third party. They didn’t carry out the threat, either, though they seemed to have more success at pushing their own views on party leaders.
As many readers know, I finished my APPA Certification in philosophical counseling a year ago. In fact, it was closer to two years ago. Since then, I’ve been a practicing philosophical counselor. I even have a page on this website for philosophical counseling services.
What have I learned? Has philosophy shown its power to help people with everyday problems? Have I gain any insights from my work? Or has the appeal to philosophy to solve practical matters flopped?
First of all, people haven’t exactly been knocking down my door seeking philosophical counseling services. But that’s normal and expected. Philosophical counseling is relatively new, and insurance plans don’t cover it. Furthermore, it’s not my first job. I haven’t exactly been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars advertising myself.
But I’ve had clients. And in this post, I’ll draw on my experiences working with two particular clients. We can draw some lessons from those cases. Of course, I’ll use artificial names in order to keep them anonymous.
Jon Green easily won his June primary election. But JC Dems have mixed feelings about it.
Facing multiple challengers, he pulled out 49% of the popular vote, finishing nearly 20% higher than the second place candidate. And he won 13 of 14 precincts, losing the 14th by only three votes. This looks curiously similar to Green’s last election in 2022. In that one, he faced a spirited primary challenge from a Democratic Party insider.
But there’s something curious about Green’s appeal to the electorate. Consistently, he’s more popular with independents and in the general election than with the loudest and most active members of his own party.
That’s worth thinking about.
A few weeks before the primary, I made the following post on Facebook: Democrats should carefully reflect on why they don’t like Jon Green. I suspect the answer to that question says a lot about why most Iowans dislike their party and why their party, as presently constituted, has no long-term electoral viability in Iowa.
In re-posting here, I wanted to raise the challenge for a broader audience. JC Dems should think about why they don’t like Jon Green. And they should think about what this says about their prospects of building a party that can compete in electoral cycles that aren’t nationwide blue waves (i.e., most of them).
